Author
Topic: The Buran Thread (Read 477314 times)

Known facts: About 1980 a senior officer in the technical intelligence department of the GRU offered his services to the Surete (French FBI). He was code-named FAREWELL and supplied the West with the names of all the GRU agents and informers. Certain US agencies supplied these agents with a vast supply of bogus information. Eventually, FAREWELL broke down under the strain of being a defector-in-place and murdered his girlfriend in front of a bus stop full of horrified Moscow commuters. There is a good book about this case (and a not-so-good French film).

Rumors: The FAREWELL disinformation package included a lot of deceptive information about the US Space Shuttle. Supposedly NASA supplied the GRU with technical reports on proposed sub-systems that had been rejected in favor of other approaches. Some of these reports led to differences between Shuttle and Buran which are otherwise inexplicable.

The most common claim is that disinformation led to errors in the tiles, tile mountings, or inter-tile spacers, which failed badly during re-entry. The Russians never have admitted this.

Another claim is that Buran's "green" GOX/Kerosene RCS thruster system worked very badly. The GOX supply was replenished from the LOX tanks of the OMS system by burning a small amount of kerosene, which contaminated the GOX with water droplets and soot. The water was (mostly) separated out, but the soot went on to foul the igniters in the thrusters. According to this rumor, several thrusters were not firing properly after only two orbits. A similar system was the original baseline for the Shuttle Orbiter, so it seems logical that it was supplied in the FAREWELL disinformation program.

The truth about all this is buried in secret files. Don't expect them to be opened soon.

One of the main problems was TPS damage. Seven heat protection tiles were lost and many more were damaged. The worst was on the left wing, where three tiles were lost in the same location, allowing hot plasma to enter and damage the wing's titanium structure on reentry.You can do a forum search or google "Buran tile damage"..

« Last Edit: 07/20/2017 01:44 AM by Zero-G »

Logged

"I still don't understand who I am: the first human or the last dog in space." - Yuri Gagarin

One of the main problems was TPS damage. Seven heat protection tiles were lost and many more were damaged. The worst was on the left wing, where three tiles were lost in the same location, allowing hot plasma to enter and damage the wing's titanium structure on reentry.You can do a forum search or google "Buran tile damage"..

The damage is difficult to assess from that single image, but in general the damage of Buran's structure seems to be exaggerated by many based on little evidence such as this image. It was also common and natural tendency during (and post-) cold war to minimize achievements of the Buran program in the west. Such as "the whole structure was warped! It would never have flown again", and so on. This is the first time I have seen those images, and other than that group of tiles missing at the wingtip, the tile loss appears to have been quite minimal. That wing damage looks like it would have been repairable if the program wasn't already dead when Buran landed.

According to yesterday's TASS report the trucks carrying the various parts of Buran were to depart Moscow on June 29 and arrive at the port of Kavkaz (on the Kerch strait in the Stavropol region) on July 3. There they will be loaded onto a sea-going vessel and leave for Sochi, with arrival at the Imeretinskiy port in Sochi expected on July 5. From there Buran will be transported to the Sirius Educational Center. Refurbishment work is expected to take 1.5 months. Buran will be part of a permanent space exhibition at Sirius that will open in early 2018. It will be joined by a full-scale mock-up of the cancelled Kliper spacecraft and may eventually also be joined by a full-scale mock-up of Federatsia.

According to Vadim Lukashevich, editor of the site "Buran.ru", the owners of the mark "Buran" have requested to the Russian justice the closure of the site, due to the unauthorized use of the mark "Buran".

I did save the whole site, as Vadim requested. It took a week though, as the site's upload is 24 KB/s! Many thanks to Vadim for his work, and I hope he wins the court case!

For some reason most of the video of the roll-out to the pad (4:45 to 5:45) actually shows the second flight vehicle during a test roll-out to the pad in May 1991 (not the pre-flight roll-out in October 1988). You can see that many of the vehicle's tiles are still missing and the Energia is not a flightworthy model.

Much more unique Buran footage is available on Vadim Lukashevich's website (which seems to be back online). http://www.buran.ru/htm/video.htmMost of the video of preparations for the mission and the actual flight is on pages 7 to 12.

The only orbital launch of a Buran-class orbiter occurred at 03:00:02 UTC on 15 November 1988 from Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad 110/37.[3][5] Buran was lifted into space, on an unmanned mission, by the specially designed Energia rocket. The automated launch sequence performed as specified, and the Energia rocket lifted the vehicle into a temporary orbit before the orbiter separated as programmed. After boosting itself to a higher orbit and completing two orbits around the Earth, the ODU engines fired automatically to begin the descent into the atmosphere, return to the launch site, and horizontal landing on a runway.

yet another video surfaces: First part is real footage the second part (Launch) is CGI.

Nice video, but the first part is CGI too: The "Atlant" carrier aircraft never transported a Buran in the shown configuration. For transportation with the "Atlant", the vertical tail of the Buran had to be removed, to save weight and avoid problems with aerodynamic stability.The VM-T "Atlant" were developed to transport the components of the Energia/Buran program as a stop-gap measure, when the development of the Antonov An-225 "Mriya" was running behind schedule. The An-225, derived from the An-124 "Ruslan" transport, was the only aircraft used to carry a complete Buran.

The "Atlant" are heavily modified Myasishchev 3MN-2 tankers. Three airframes have been converted in total, two flying, one for static tests.The two flying examples are easily distinguishable: The first one has an inflight refuelling probe installed on its nose, while the second one has none. Both of them still exist: The first airframe is stored at the airbase in Ryazan, the second one is in Zhukovsky, parked at the old Myasishchev ramp, and is usually towed to the static display area for the biannual MAKS airshow.

Besides: The real boat-tail fairing covering the back of Buran had a different shape than in this video and the real Atlants had Aeroflot markings with civilian registrations, not military markings.

This is a photo I took of OK-1K2 "Ptichka" still standing in the MKZ building, the similarity to the US design is striking especially in the design of the maneuvering system at the bow of the aircraft...